Monday, January 9, 2012

I Heart My Community!

So I'm back from the holidays! I hope everyone had a great and LARPalicious holiday season! I received a few gifts which are specifically intended for use with my next PC, and so I am super excited about that! Now I need to teach myself how to play the wooden flute...

But this post is not about that. This post is going to be me rhapsodizing about the community of LARP, and how awesome it is.

As I mentioned in a previous entry, one of my regular LARPs is a post-apocalyptic fantasy game called Cobalt Nightmares, and I play an engineer named Irene. Ever since I started playing Irene, I knew that I wanted to have a boffer wrench for her. As well, the first game I played her, I came into possession of an ancient pistol. A friend was able to pick me up a NERF physrep for about five bucks and gave it to me at the next game. Of course, it was all done up in neon NERF colors, so I knew a paint job was in its future.

Now, I am not much of a foamsmith. I know enough about it in theory, but have yet to actually put knife to foam. I'm a pretty good costumer and can run my machine through it's paces - and I have in fact traded a costume for some boffer throwing daggers. So I picked up some craft foam when Joann's was having it on sale, and had a vague idea about cutting out a wrenchy shape and then duct-taping it. I posted this on Twitter & Facebook, and not less than ten minutes later, a friend is offering to help me.

She gives me a shopping list of glue sticks, Plasti-dip, spray paint and contact cement, all of which I easily found at Home Depot. Then shows up the next day with all of her crafting supplies and basically proceeds to make a wrench in front of me while I watch, make tea and occasionally hold the blow dryer or add another coat of Plasti-dip. She also helped me antique my NERF pistol with an ink wash.

Not only were the end results better than anything I could have done on my own, I learned quite a lot just by watching my friend.

And that's what I like so much about the LARP community - the amazing generosity of spirit shown by so many of its members. So many people want to help in my primary game that Staff has had to ask people not to donate anything which hasn't been specifically solicited. If players have the time and resources, they're almost always happy to use those for the betterment of the game itself. I've donated to games, and I always wish I could give more.